Reflections on Lattimer: a Complex and Significant Event

42 Pennsylvania History Reflections on Lattimer: A Complex and Significant Event Perry K. Blatz Duquesne University Although the Lattimer Massacre is reasonably well known, it is still important to put it in context. Once that's done, we'll realize it is not as well known as it ought to be. As with so many notorious events, the occurrences surrounding the Massacre are stark - nineteen dead and perhaps fifty wounded in a crowd of several hundred immigrant mineworkers marching peaceably on a public road. Indeed, the Mas- sacre of Friday, September 10, 1897 is so horrific that people are likely to learn of it first because of its shock value and only then turn to the context. This differs fundamentally from the way we commonly approach historical events: by examining particular national, regional industrial, or social contexts, and, in the process, finding events that exemplify the specific context that captures our interest. The temptation is to place the Lattimer Massacre in the most significant context possible: the unionization of the anthracite coal region which resulted from the industry-wide strikes of 1900 and 1902. This context gives the satisfaction that the victims' martyrdom was not in vain. At the very least, viewing the Massacre as one step in a progressive march of events to that significant achievement makes makes it easier to understand. However, such a yearning for significance does not match our knowl- edge of the Massacre and its aftermath. Indeed, the strikes that preceded it were so chaotic, the role of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) so problematic, and the outcome of the strikes so inconclusive that a year-and-a-half after the Massacre the anthracite industry seemed further away from unionization than it had been for many years. Although not a crucial link in a chain of events leading inexorably to unionization, the Massacre claims even greater importance in and of itself. Juxtaposed to the much more well-known Homestead Steel Strike, which occurred five years earlier near Pittsburgh, Lattimer emerges as deserving an equally significant place in the history of Amer- ican labor. Futhermore, the reasons for the comparative neglect of the Reflections on Lattimer: A Complex and Significant Event 43 Massacre tell an important story about what events tend to capture the attention of historians. The area in and around Hazleton in the middle or the Lehigh coal region experienced little labor protest after a failed strike that lasted from September 1887 until March 1888.1 Workers there had not responded to the short-lived organizing efforts of the UMWA in the fall of 1894. Then the union brought perhaps five thousand workers from the south- ern or Schuylkill coal region into its ranks. But by the beginning of 1897, only a few hundred of them still belonged, giving the Schuylkill region little more organization than either the Lehigh field or the Wyoming (northern) coal region. John Fahy, the union's organizer and president of its only anthracite district at the time, had gradually aban- doned organizing and decided to lobby for state legislation in Harris- burg. His most notable success, one that would have considerable significance for the strikes that would unfold into the Lattimer Massacre, was the passage of a tax on employers of three cents per day for each unnaturalized alien they employed. The tax could be deducted, however, from employees' earnings.2 As of August 1897, not only were the mines around Hazleton unorganized, but the only man who could have changed this had given up, instead seeking to discourage the employ- ment of immigrants, who were increasingly dominating the work force in the Lehigh region, as well as in the other coal fields. The area around Hazleton. As Fahy put it in the United Mine Workers Journal in July 1897: "What a world of good this law would do to the American citizens who try to earn their living in the coal mines if the tax were one dollar per day."3 The initial stirring of protest that would eventually result in the fatal confrontation at Lattimer came from an unexpected source: young workers. No record exists of the ethnicity of the thirty or so mule drivers who walked off their jobs four weeks before the Massacre, although it is reasonable to assume they were either eastern European immigrants or their children. Nor is there a record of their ages, but if they were typical of mule drivers throughout the coal industry, most were in their teens. The young workers confronted Gomer Jones, superintendent of the Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre Coal Company, whose cost-cutting meas- 1. Harold W. Aurand, From the Molly Magpires to the UnitedMine Workers: The Social Ecology ofan Industrial Union (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1971), 121-130; Perry K Blatz, Democ- ratic Miners: Work and Labor Relations in the Anthracite Coal Industrf, 1875-1925 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 41-42. 2. Blatz, DemocraticMiners, 45-54. 3. Quoted in ibid., 54. 44 Pennsylvania History ures included consolidating stables for the mules, thus requiring the drivers to walk further to get and then return the animals. This initial dispute blossomed into a series of strikes, as more workers left their jobs at this and other companies. The precipitating factor for strikes in the other mines, especially the strip mines where immigrants dominated the work force, appeared to be the tax on aliens, since those walkouts began shortly after the tax was deducted from their wages beginning on August 21.4 While there is no need to recapitulate Michael Novak's detailed account of the strikes,5 it is important to note their spontaneous, even chaotic, nature. Workers at various mines would strike, return to work, and then walk out again. They cited grievances ranging from unequal pay for the same work to being forced to deal with the company store to experiencing abuse and discrimination from supervisors. However, amidst the chaos arose a strain of solidarity. For example, on August 25 at the A S. Van Wickle Company's Coleraine mine, the youngest workers-the slate pickers who were generally pre-teens - struck, accusing their company of paying them less than workers at the surrounding mines. The bosses brought immigrant workers from a nearby strip mine to replace them, but the immigrants refused and surrounded the superintendent's office. Within two days workers had struck there as well and next marched to Minersville, several miles away, to persuade those men to join the strike.6 The curious role of the UMWA and organizer John Fahy is just as important as the spontaneous nature of the strikes in leading to the Mas- sacre. If any situation was ripe for a labor leader to shape inchoate worker militancy into vigorous demands, it was that in the Hazleton area in the late summer of 1897. But given his lack of interest in organizing and negative attitude toward immigrants, Fahy's measured response was predictable. While he moved quickly to organize UMWA locals where strikes were in progress, he made no effort to provide cen- tralized leadership. Nor did he encourage the workers from different companies to unite around a common set of demands, or even to dis- cuss doing so. He pointedly attempted to discourage workers from marching from one mine to another to expand the strike. This tactic, spontaneously adopted again and again despite Fahy/s warnings, caused the walkouts to spread. As they did, Sheriff James L. Martin of Luzerne 4. Ibid.., 55-58. 5. The Guns of Lattimer: The True Story of a Massacre and a Trial August 1897-March 1898 (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 6. Blatz, DemocraticMiners., 55-58. Reflections on Lattimer: A Complex and Significant Event 45 County deputized some one hundred citizens to block the marches. The Lattimer Massacre took place when strikers from the Harwood Mine, owned by Calvin Pardee, marched toward his mine at Lattimer to bring their fellow workers into the strike Friday afternoon, September 10.7 While eight thousand workers left their jobs before the Massacre to be joined by two thousand more after it, the outcome of the strikes must be termed inconclusive. This makes it all the more difficult to classify the Massacre among landmark events in the history of American labor. If some workers achieved limited gains, most returned to the status quo. At several mines, workers did not even have the chance to formulate grievances. On the other hand, there are no reports of widespread fir- ings or blacklistings. While some twenty-five hundred Pennsylvania National Guardsmen arrived shortly after the Massacre, they did not have the effect they had elsewhere, most notably at Homestead, of allowing employers to bring in large numbers of strike breakers. In any event, after the Massacre practically all the mines were operating within two weeks of September 10.8 To complicate the Massacre's outcome still further, Fahy succeeded in organizing several thousand mine workers in and around Hazleton. By keeping his distance from the strikes that led to the Massacre, he and the UMWA escaped blame for it. They could proudly deny charges made by Calvin Pardee that he had "stirred up" the men.9 Early in 1898, the locals around Hazleton were gathered into a new anthracite District Seven with its own officers, men who had been more prominently involved in the 1897 walkouts than Fahy. Nevertheless, these local gains did not extend to the rest of the anthracite region with its workforce of more than 150,000 in the Wyoming field to the north.

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